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Live: Recruitment Asia 2017, Singapore

Welcome to Recruitment Asia 2017, Singapore – a two-day conference that will address your top recruitment concerns through comprehensive and insightful case studies, keynote presentations and interactive panel discussions from top-notch HR leaders across industries in Asia.

Reporting live from One Farrer Hotel & Spa, today’s conference will see a stellar line-up of recruitment experts who will share their challenges and successes. Stay tuned for live updates: http://bit.ly/RASG2017


As curtains close on this year’s edition of Recruitment Asia, we thank our sponsors for their support:

  1. Gold sponsor – Alexander Mann Solutions
  2. Exhibitors – Morgan McKinley | Sonru
  3. Event partner – Kelly Services Korea
  4. Lanyard sponsor – Recruit Inc
  5. Official photobooth partner – Selfiprint
  6. All our association and media partners

Those sessions bring us to the end of Recruitment Asia 2017, Singapore. Hope all of you had a great time and managed to bring home a few key takeaways from the conference. Thank you once again to all our speakers, delegates and sponsors, and we do hope to see you again next year.


We now have a panel of five HR experts who will discuss ideas of creating a balance between the internal and external workforce in the age of the gig economy.

For this, we have the pleasure of welcoming Mike Tang, talent acquisition lead at Publicis Media Singapore [seated far right], whom you have met earlier, back on stage as the panel moderator. Joining him are panelists [seated left to right]:

  • Michael Wright, global head of talent acquisition, Grab
  • Hua Tai-Kit, talent acquisition lead, APAC, Cargill
  • Padmashree Santosh, associate director, talent and development, SEA, Merck Group
  • Suzie Custerson, global business effectiveness lead, talent management, Manulife

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Our next speaker promises to follow through with a presentation linking recruitment to business growth - in terms of the people, process and technology perspective - Gaurav Sharma, the HR director for Coca-Cola’s Singapore and Malaysia bottling operations, where his role is to build capability and lead HR transformation.

He comes to this role with plenty of experience, from past employers - PepsiCo, ICI (now AkzoNobel) and Vega Foods. Today, he brings a refreshing take on recruitment's role in business strategy.

Talking about Coca-Cola bottling investment group's monthly cycle of reflect, engage, align, and listen; Sharma zooms in to "listen", i.e. "humanising work that is most important to us, and getting feedback from your team in order to manage them better."

Shifting focus to onboarding, he says: "When you get people through the door, they come with certain expectations - how will their career take off here, what kind of support will they get?"

"For us, it's really simple - we tell them, you all come with a secret formula. You will need to understand what your strengths are, you will then identify which roles are best for you. We tell them to plan this with their manager. But the important thing is - the accountability is with the employee.

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Starting off today's conference is the head of recruitment for GlaxoSmithKline for the Asia region, John Kivel. John has global experience in designing and implementing recruitment strategies across APAC, North America and EMEA - apart from his deep experience in executing high-volume growth and streamlining processes.

He is no stranger to Asia, having lived and worked internationally for the past 15 years, currently residing in Shanghai. Today his presentation is on recruitment in the age of rapid innovation and tough competition.

He starts off by talking about the need to change the way we do job descriptions, and why we in the industry must stop making them so boring, and make them innovative instead - to a rapt audience. "The reason why this stuff matters - the candidates care about the experience," he says.

"My colleagues and I have begun to take this very seriously. We came out with a project charter, to put a methodology in place to attack the problem of candidate experience." He adds: "One way to look at it is- how did you feel when you were interviewed? That will help you think about the candidates -it could be the biggest day of the year for them."

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Human Resources regional editor Aditi Sharma Kalra welcomes delegates as she opens the event.

In her opening speech, she said: “For this first day of the conference, some of the highlights are keynote presentations by HR heads from Coca-Cola bottling investment group, Grab's global head of talent acquisition, and Diageo's regional talent engagement lead. They are going to cover a number of topics on stage - but equally we will have an opportunity to have off-stage debriefs, during roundtable conversations as well.”

With that, she welcomes the first speaker on stage.

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Follow us on Telegram and on Instagram @humanresourcesonline for all the latest HR and manpower news from around the region!

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